It was 95 degrees at Lindbergh Field — at 8 a.m. And it kept getting hotter. Much, much hotter.

Harry Moore’s home in Bonita was already “hotter than blazes” when he left for work at Rohr Industries in Chula Vista. Like many employees at Rohr and around the region, he quickly took off the tie he was wearing.

Related

Moore, now 85 and a lifelong San Diego County resident, said his co-workers at Rohr didn’t take his advice about opening the windows and pulling up the drapes. “They said no, no, let’s keep everything closed,” he remembered. “And it turns out they were right.”

The outside air that day was best left outside. Chula Vista hit 108 degrees. Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s official weather station, reached 100 later in the morning and continued to rise. Around 2 p.m., the mercury maxed out at 111 degrees, and it stayed there for more than an hour. That broke the city’s 50-year-old record of 110, set on Sept. 17, 1913.

Anthony Giacalone, who lives in the Hillcrest home he grew up in, was a freshman at San Diego State, where the official high was 107. He recalled classes being canceled and how miserable it was at home.

“We had no air conditioning. I never knew anyone who did,” Giacalone said. “And our house had no insulation at all. It was roasting.”

The entire county was roasting. Carlsbad and Oceanside hit 108. National City, Vista and Fallbrook reached 106. El Cajon climbed to 112.

But it was San Diego’s temperature that was furthest from the norm. The city’s average high on Sept. 26 is 75 degrees.

Still, if San Diego is going to reach or surpass 100, it’s most likely to happen this time of year. Of the 26 times the city has hit the century mark, 22 have come in September or October. All of the city’s 10 hottest days (daily temperature records go back to 1878) have come during these two months. Four of those top 10 came later than Sept. 26.

Longtime county residents know that late-summer, early-fall heat is almost always associated with a Santa Ana condition. High pressure in the upper atmosphere, usually centered somewhere over the Southwest or Great Basin, pushes hot, dry air from the desert toward the coast. Winds frequently howl in the mountains and canyons, and the fire danger skyrockets.

Near the coast, it becomes a battle between the onshore flow of cool marine air and the hot, super dry air from inland. Where those air masses meet is often the dividing line between scorching heat and tolerable warmth.

On Sept. 26, 1963, a large, powerful dome of high pressure dominated the West, but it wasn’t in its usual spot.

“The high was right over San Diego,” said Alex Tardy, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Rancho Bernardo office.

The high pressure kicked up a strong Santa Ana, forced hot, dry air all the way to the surface and “completely obliterated” the marine layer, Tardy said. Relative humidity fell to 6 percent at Lindbergh Field.